[caption id="attachment_1052" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Hermit's Peak"][/caption]   One hundred seventy-five years ago, the storm and thunder of native elk swarmed the piñon-laced hills outside of Las Vegas, New Mexico. The land looked different then. Beaver claimed the Rio Gallinas in numbers much larger than today. The river bent to nature’s whims, snaking around geological dips in the landscape, flooding the plains during spring thaw. The land grew wetter, greener, and denser. Prairie dogs dotted the landscape with cavernous burrows. They chewed the delicate native grasses, prompting the growth of tender shoots that elk love to explode across the plains. It’s difficult to imagine how Las Vegas used to appear before cattle barons carved the land and shifted the balance of natural power, forced thick fence stakes into the red earth in order to keep the neighbors and Native Americans at bay, before fur trappers scented rusting traps with the glands of dead beaver in the hopes of snagging a fat prize. In 1835, Spanish settlers applied for a communal land grant from Mexico, asked to settle in a rolling valley beneath the Sangre de Christo Mountains. New Mexico wasn’t yet a State of the Union. The railroad connecting east to…